Sunday, February 25th, 2018
Distance covered: 740km
Driving time: 9am – 7pm
Weather: Sunny, snow and later heavy snow in the afternoon
Lowest temperature: -10C
Border crossings: none

The next morning, we realised we had BSC-company (Baltic Taxi / Team 68) and enjoyed  breakfast together, before driving on a scenic road along red Swedish houses and snow-covered lakes towards Ryd. As task of the day, we had to find an abandoned car junkyard in a wood next to the street and the wreck of ABBA’s tour bus. It was a morbid, but beautiful scenery and just few other BSC team around.

On our way north we entered a fully snow-covered landscape and finally, left dry concrete roads and started to gain some first experiences with ice-covered roads. As always, driving is easy, hitting the brakes the real problem and curves something to watch out for. the good thing was, that we were more or less alone on the streets and only met another car only every 30 minutes.

Around 2pm we reached “Astrid Lindgren Country”, drove through Marinnelund und finally arrived in Gillerby where we visited the Katthult farm, where the famous “Michel aus Lönnberga” series from our youth was filmed.

Everything still was like in the movie, not a cardboard set-up, but a real small farm house in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, with Alfred’s house, the lake, the “Trissebude” and the shed were Michel did his woodcarvings.

Next, we tried Swedish McDonalds in Linköping, the home of Saab (these days jets only) and drove further north towards our final destination Gävle.

While we originally had planned to spend the night in Stockholm, we decided to get further north as the car was still making bad sounds and we anticipated that visiting the garage will cost time on a day that should get us up to Vilhelmina, to the first BSC party, we for sure didn’t want to miss.

At 7:30pm we arrived in Gälve in the dark with light snowfall and it seemed to snow a lot during the day, at least 30cm.

The hotel was easy but good and we could park just in front of it, which made it easy to carry our stock of beer and champagne inside, as the outside temperature was close to -10. Dinner was again a disappointment, but we enjoyed some local IPA and had a great sleep.